It is 1998. There are men dressed as funeral directors on the pitch. There is a coffin being carried around the football ground, the letters ‘DRFC’ spelled out in flowers laid atop.

It is the final day of the football season and my club Doncaster Rovers have been relegated, from the first time in their proud history, to the Football Conference. They have won just four games all season. They have lost thirty-four.

Two years prior, our chairman Ken Richardson, had tried to burn our Belle Vue ground down, only being rumbled and subsequently charged-then-imprisoned, after a mobile phone was found left upon the scene that was discovered to have been previously used by his hired hands to leave a message on Richardson’s phone saying, “job done”.

Three years before that, Richardson had tried to sell Belle Vue. Brazen, really… given that it wasn’t actually his to sell.

Back to 97/98, and beloved first team manager Sammy Chung had been sacked ninety minutes before the first game of the season, unaware Kerry Dixon had been installed as the new Doncaster Rovers player/manager until he opened the door to his office to find the free scoring Chelsea legend sat behind his desk.

Dixon would leave before Christmas – but not before overseeing a 8-0 tonking by Nottingham Forest in the League Cup – claiming it was the chairman, not the manager, who was picking the team.

Further embarrassments ensued. 45 players were used that season, perhaps most notable – in his one appearance as a professional footballer – goalkeeper Dave Smith, who kept goal in a 3-1 defeat to second bottom Brighton. It later transpired Smith lived on the same street as Richardson stooge and stand-in manager Mark Weaver.

In fact, it took until April for Rovers to win a game, our 24th of the season, against Chester City. I celebrated with a fervor I’d love to tell you about, but I can’t remember a single thing about the night that played out upon the calling of full-time…

I’ve sometimes wondered if celebrity Doncaster Rovers fan Louis Tomlinson , now owner of the club, was present that night, or any other night that season, the lowest experience in my life as a football fan. Probably not - the One Direction warbler would have been only seven. And there were less than 900 people there.

And I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d never come back, supported Leeds or a Sheffield club, like most kids around town. But I know Tomlinson was there on many occasions in the decade that followed. I used to buy burgers from him during his teenage, pre-X-Factor employ on the burger bar.

Louis has been on our journey. Up the league, down it, up it and then down back again. He’s seen things . He is, truly, ‘Rovers until I die’.

Which is why the news that Doncaster’s most famous son (sorry Kevin Keegan, let’s talk when you hit 17 million Twitter followers…) has taken over my beloved Rovers, fills me with excitement and hope. Not anger or embarrassment.

As all Rovers fans of a certain age will testify, we know embarrassment. We’re on first name terms with embarrassment. And it can’t hum a song anywhere near as catchy as That’s What Makes You Beautiful.

The news Tomlinson has put his money where his mouth is, might just be the best thing to happen to Rovers for years.

(Image: FameFlynet)

For one thing, and far less widely reported than Tomlinson’s involvement (largely due to looking significantly worse in tight jeans than he) is the reemergence of one John Ryan, local lad, former Doncaster Rovers chairman – and, for about three minutes against Hereford United in April 2003, at the age of 52 years and 11 months (it’s right there in the Guinness Book Of Records) a Doncaster Rovers player (are you honestly telling me that if you owned a football club and swept away the misery of the aforementioned Richardson era, you wouldn’t pick yourself to play?)

Ryan might be a cocky, limelight-hogging sort. And his association with shamed football agent Willie McKay in 2011, where the pair colluded to turn Rovers into a sort of faded footballer flea market, resulting in the club dropping out of The Championship like a stone dropped from a very tall building, blotted his jotter somewhat.

But I dread to think where Rovers would be without him. After the horrors of the nineties, the noughties, with Ryan at the helm, were weekly visits into dreamland for all Rovers fans. We had some great times, until an internal bust up saw him step away late last year. I can’t think of a single Rovers fan who doesn’t want him back.

Ryan is an ambitious, resourceful sort – a self-made millionaire, the plastic surgeon who, um, brought Melinda Messenger to prominence in the late nineties - and now, one can’t help feeling that in Tomlinson, he’s found his golden ticket.

He desperately wants to make Doncaster Rovers a success and he knows, as a club of modest stature, he must think outside the box to do so. As for Tomlinson – who, let’s remember, was signed as a Rovers reserve team player last season, and in turn, via a bunch of appearances on the pitch, nobly raised an insane amount of money for local children’s hospice Bluebell Wood - I think he just wants to live the dream.

Pop star, football player - I’d be amazed if he didn’t declare his intentions to be an astronaut by December. But I don’t question for a second that he doesn’t care deeply about my, and his, football club.

(Image: FameFlynet)

Friends who follow other clubs have said to me, ‘aren’t you scared a pop star might own your club?’

Here is my reply: I would be scared if a Russian oligarch who never speaks owned my club. Or a Malaysian businessman with killer's gloves and a blatant disregard for my club's history. Or a mute sports retailer with an infatuation with Joe Kinnear. But a fan? I want fans to work for my club.

To which I say: when you’ve watched a handful of crying pensioners, tatty red and white hooped scalves hanging around their neck, somber and withdrawn, watching a mock up coffin being carried around a football pitch, you really learn to not have a problem with a fresh new generation of fans coming into your football club, regardless of whether they scream or not.

I’m excited by the prospect of Louis stepping into the boardroom. I’m excited about where Doncaster Rovers might go next. But to be honest, as long as he doesn’t try to burn down the ground, I’ll be perfectly happy.

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James McMahon is the editor of Kerrang! Magazine, this article was originally published on 31/5/2014, but has been edited to reflect the news that Louis Tomlinson has taken over Doncaster Rovers Football Club.